


Go to Him

by isthemachinesinging



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-18
Updated: 2013-03-18
Packaged: 2017-12-05 16:55:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/725635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isthemachinesinging/pseuds/isthemachinesinging





	Go to Him

He doesn’t question it when she comes back.

After all, they’ve met similar ends, both of them: struck down by an archangel. Michael for her, burning her grace to ash; Raphael for him, shattering his grace and his borrowed vessel with the force of his light. He came back. He thought at the time it was so he could finish the job of stopping the apocalypse, the Winchester job. Now, two more resurrections later, he’s certain it’s a punishment. He wonders if it’s a punishment for her, too.

He’s standing on the glistening, ropy rock of a cooled lava flow when she appears. He’s not quite sure why he’s here—he feels as if he’s avoiding something, trying not to look for something that he can’t even name. He feels the desperate call and pull of Dean’s prayers, constant as the tide. He resists going to him, even as the prayers are shot through with anger and fear.

_Where the hell are you, man?_ The latest plea sears itself into his grace, the particular fold and bend of light where he had cradled Dean’s soul, pulling it struggling and clawing and spitting from the Pit. He wonders if Dean remembers that, remembers how his soul fought to remain in Hell.

_You don’t think you deserve to be saved._

It had been one of the first things he’d said to him in human-voice.  An angel always knew exactly what it was and what it was for. This was his first close contact with a human soul, and he’d felt a kind of wondering horror at the inwardly-directed doubt and hate he felt from Dean.

That was a lifetime ago, years that were not even a shiver of time in the eons of his existence, and yet he’s become a different being several times over. He understands the doubt now, and the hatred of self. He wonders if his own grace fought back as his Father pulled it from oblivion again and again. He thinks it must have; surely he would not have returned willingly.

 She is not there, and then she is, standing next to him. A soft rush of vibration from her wings is the only announcement of her arrival.

“Castiel.” She speaks his full name, of which sound is only a part. An angel’s true name is sound and light, color and touch. It’s something felt as much as heard, the vibrations of spoken syllables only an extrusion into human consciousness.

“Anna.” He doesn’t turn to look; knows what he’ll see—the same vessel, red hair and soft eyes. Small and delicate, such an odd house for one so powerful. He wonders if she chose it knowingly, when she fell, to become so small. “You’ve returned.”

“No thanks to you.” Her voice is soft and without accusation. “Last we spoke, you were threatening to kill me.”

He hesitates. “You were wrong. Sam Winchester did not need to die. Lucifer was returned to the Cage, and the Apocalypse was overcome.”

“So I see.” He sees a shadow flicker beside him as she stretches out her hands. “All this is still here.”

“Lucifer hated humanity. He did not hate the Earth. He would not have destroyed this.”

She sighs, and it’s a sound he recognizes, from old when it was a flickering vibration in her grace. She’s exasperated with him. “But you can’t separate them so cleanly. Humanity is part of the Earth. That’s what he didn’t understand. What we didn’t understand. We thought our Father made this new thing, to replace us. But…”

There’s a long silence, and it’s not at all uncomfortable. He reaches out to her with the higher vibrations of his grace, meeting and intertwining with her own; a handholding of angels. She shifts and moves her vessel closer to his, so that both borrowed flesh and grace meet, a gesture of comfort.

“I think not everything is about us.”

He flickers his grace in assent, and they stand together for a long, quiet moment, looking out at the rushing sea, the blue sky. It’s beautiful, in a way that makes his vessel’s breath catch and his grace pulse with wonder. He can see and feel the roar of waves crashing against the cliffs below; beneath that he hears the vibrating hum of the life teeming in the water, the heat of light striking and bending around his vessel, melding with his grace. Being envesseled—it’s still a cacophony of astonishment, even after all this time, his grace compressed to human-size, his senses dualed—the human and the angel.

As inevitable in a quiet moment, his thoughts shift to Dean, and shame sparks through his grace. Shame and fear and longing, glowing and humming and announcing themselves to Anna. She wraps a hand around his vessel’s arm, entwines her grace tighter into his, pulling the slow, deep vibration of his Dean-thoughts into her own grace. He can feel her examining them.

Her grace begins to shiver moments before he hears her vessel’s breath change, soft careful gasps. He turns to look at her, unsurprised to see the tears tracking her face. As he watches, her eyes fill and overflow again as she blinks, sending fresh rivulets coursing down her cheeks. When she speaks, it is not through her vessel but through her grace, a high shattering hum.

“Go to him.”

He twists in shame. “I can’t. It’s dangerous.  _I’m_  dangerous.”

“You’ve always been a danger to him. And he to you.”

“This is different. “  _Because I don’t know why_ , he thinks. He opens up his grace to her completely, his hubris and rage, the destruction of Heaven, how far he ran to avoid it. The curious blankness when he tries now to think of returning, of trying to right his wrongs. The piercing sorrow he felt, driving a blade through his brother, a memory for which purpose and action seem curiously disconnected.

Intertwined through all of this is his fear that he is a danger to his human family, to Dean. The fear that he might do to Dean what he did to his angel-brother Samandriel. He fears one day he will have an identical memory, with Dean in Samandriel’s place—the blade driven into flesh, a moment curiously held outside of time, dressed in meaning that feels like an alien afterthought.

He and Dean, they’ve been broken and shattered and smelted, yet they’ve always come back together.  _I need you_ —and he supposes that’s the plain truth of it now. He’s unsure of what Dean’s need is; what compelled him to fight his way through the unending monsters of Purgatory to find him—and he had felt every one, had kept himself attuned to Dean’s movements, even as he constantly moved to stay far from him. But he’s beginning to understand what his own need is, and he supposes it’s the dark shadow that has penetrated his grace, the unspoken fear that he’s not quite who he is, that has awoken the realization. Because it’s Dean that keeps him  _Castiel_ , that keeps him  _Cas_. With Dean, he remembers who he is, who he ought to be. And that’s something that is both profoundly changed and yet still fundamentally the same as the being Castiel has always been.

She withdraws her grace from his suddenly, leaving him bereft, hollow—as if she had suddenly turned her back on him in mid-conversation. She speaks, confined to her vessel’s voice, and that voice is sharp and hurt.

“ _Go to him._ ” There’s a catch in her voice, and then she continues more gently, “You have to, you know it. You need each other, and whatever this is…it will keep chasing you as long as you avoid it.”

There’s a darkness in her voice, a knowing hint. “Do you know what it is?”

“I remember…something. After you turned me in…a room. Bright. I can’t…it slips away when I try to touch it.”

He stills. Something tries to push into his awareness; Samandriel, panicked, pulling at him, speaking hurried and anxious as if he knew he had only moments to give him a message. But his words, Samandriel’s words, skitter away from him even as he tries to grasp them. He tries to recall the vibrations of Samandriel’s grace, to pull the memory into clarity that way, but he can feel only shadow.

“I don’t remember. But…I should.”

“Go to Dean. Whatever it is…face it together.”

“I am afraid,” his voice is soft, barely a whisper of breath in his vessel’s throat. “I’m afraid I’ll hurt him again.”

But it’s not hurt he’s afraid of, not really, it’s of sending Dean somewhere he can’t bring him back. An angel blade does not pierce only flesh, but soul and grace; such a death would disintegrate a soul. He wants to cry out at the thought of it, the soul that has become intertwined and bound to his grace becoming nothing.

“He tore Purgatory apart for you. He’ll fight for you. Cas, he  _knows_  now. He’s not going to let you go. He  _loves_ you.” She sighs, a shivering movement of her grace. “But I’m only telling you what you already know. What you already want. Go to him, Cas. It’s what you need. What  _he_  needs.”

He takes her words in silently, but doesn’t answer. She’s seen and felt everything, through the touch of their grace. She’s told him only what she has seen.

He feels the anticipatory spread of her wings, about to leave, and suddenly remembers.

“Anna—will you…keep watch on someone for me?” He realizes he’s used the guardian term, and hastily corrects, “Just look in on them. Be certain they’re safe.” So many wrongs he’s done, and maybe this isn’t one of them, but he has to fix what he can. There’s so much he can’t fix.

She agrees, and he gives her two names. He senses the pulse of her grace as she recognizes them, and she assents. And with a rush and flicker of wings and passing grace, she is gone, and he is left standing alone again. The sun is high in the sky; the smooth pools and whirls of cool dark stone glisten and glitter gold in the light. He stands for a long time, letting the rush and roar of the ocean’s tide fill him, expanding the sense of his grace until it feels as if the sky and sea are breathing with him, the darting rush and hum of life part of his own self. After a long while, he raises a hand to his cheek and isn’t surprised to feel that he has been crying, too, tears dried in rough salt tracks on his cheeks. His grace twists and pulses with anguish and longing.

It’s full dark before he makes up his mind, feeling the sweet and painful pull of Dean’s soul in prayer.

_Please…Guess I’m really beggin’ now. Saw Sam spittin’ blood this morning, he just said there’s nothin’ I can do. I just think…us together, we can help him. And…and if you’d just come back, we can deal with whatever crap you’ve got. You and Sam think you gotta face it on your own. But we_   _gotta face it together—_

In a thought, he moves—once here, suddenly there—and there is a dark room, Dean sitting on the edge of a bed, his back turned, his head bent. The tug of his prayer is a piercing agony at this proximity—he hears the words spoken as an echo after they glow in his core, in the places where his grace has known the other man’s soul.

“—‘cause that’s—”

The quiet rush of wings breaks his prayer off, and he jerks around, staring wide-eyed at Castiel. He swallows roughly. Castiel inclines his vessel’s head, meeting Dean’s eyes. It’s an acknowledgment, and apology, and question all at once.

“Hello, Dean.”


End file.
